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You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
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Running
Sitting
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Look
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
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A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
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The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
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Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
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The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
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I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
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Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
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Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
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At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
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I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates